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Megalithic monuments

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Megalithic monuments

Megalithic monuments—upright stones, alignments, cromlechs, slab-graves, stone urns, and rock carvings—constitute one of the most widespread and enduring material traditions of the Malay Peninsula and Borneo. By the early 1970s, approximately 650 individual megaliths had been documented in Sabah and Sarawak alone [1, p. 132], while the Mahat valley in West Sumatra contains an estimated 1,000 standing stones [2, p. 30], and the districts of Alor Gajah and Kuala Pilah in peninsular Malaysia preserve numerous paired stone alignments [3, p. 78]. These monuments span a vast chronological range, from the earliest demonstrated Bornean examples provisionally dated before 1000 A.D. [1, p. 128] to the batu tagak (upright stones) of the classical era, most likely erected between A.D. 1000 and 1500 [4, pp. 2]. Their significance lies not merely as archaeological curiosities but as expressions of settled agricultural societies, social differentiation, and ritual belief systems that persisted, in material or verbal form, well into the historical period.

Scope and Typological Diversity

The megalithic record of the region is far more varied than earlier scholarship allowed. In the Kelabit highlands of northern Sarawak, approximately 425 megaliths across eight types were recorded within an area of only about 600 square miles [1, pp. 126–127]. The Kadazan coastal plain of Sabah yielded 133 menhirs located in situ, the last of which were erected early in the twentieth century [1, pp. 124–125]. In North Borneo, H.G. Keith documented a series of Tenghilan Dusun cromlechs near Kampong Sarambutan, consisting of upright stones surrounding rectangular grave-houses, some planted in the ground and others merely resting on the surface [5, p. 153]. Tom Harrisson additionally recorded approximately twenty-five prehistoric stone urns carved from pale buff sandstone into long tubes up to nearly five feet high on the Southern Kelabit Plateau, which he compared to finds in Sumba, central Celebes, Mindanao, and the Plain of Jars in Central Laos [6, pp. 105].

On the peninsula, the dominant form is the paired stone alignment. The Kampong Ipoh alignment in Tampin, Negeri Sembilan, measured 48 metres in total length and contained 79 stones, of which 63 exhibited the characteristic features of normal menhirs [7, p. 75]. At Pengkalan Kempas, Negeri Sembilan, three principal granite monuments—two of them decorated—stand alongside a Muslim grave inscribed 1467 A.D. [8, p. 89]. In West Sumatra, the batu tagak most commonly take the form of a kris hilt, a shape shared with the Keramat Sungai Udang site near Pengkalan Kempas and still used for tombstones in the Tanahdatar area today, indicating a continuous morphological tradition spanning at least six centuries [4, pp. 4]. Prehistoric rock carvings, executed with iron tools, have also been identified: Harrisson documented masked faces with goggle eyes, spiralling nose lines, and horn-like projections on a sandstone boulder in the Ulu Tomani, Sabah, first uncovered in April 1971 [9, pp. 141–142].

Chronology and Cultural Attribution

The dating of megalithic monuments in the region has been a persistent source of scholarly debate. In Borneo, Harrisson’s excavations at Jaong, the Kelabit highlands, and the Kadazan coastal plain, supplemented by associated ceramics, metal tools, and Chinese stonewares, established that the Sungei Jaong petroglyphs and cut blocks, associated with intensive iron-working, are provisionally dated before 1000 A.D. on the basis of ceramics ranging 700–950 A.D., making them the earliest megalithic yet demonstrated by Borneo field evidence [1, p. 128]. In the Kelabit highlands, associated ceramics date no earlier than 1000 A.D., with most stones probably placed after c. 1500 A.D. [1, pp. 126–127]. Harrisson’s reclassification of Kelabit stones into “ancient” (348) versus “within past century” (73) categories, verified by test excavations, shows that the most impressive structures—large dolmens, lines of menhirs, imposing rock carvings—belong to a remote past attributed to culture heroes such as Tokid Rini [1, pp. 134–135].

On the peninsula, the question of cultural origin proved more contentious. R.O. Winstedt’s 1941 synthesis of slab-grave evidence from Perak, Sumatra, and Java evaluated competing Indian and Indo-Chinese (Mon) hypotheses without committing to either [10, pp. 93–98]. The material evidence—socketed iron tools, coarse pottery, glass and stone beads, and the notable absence of gold in any Malayan grave—resisted simple attribution [10, pp. 93]. By the 1970s, the prevailing framework had shifted decisively. The 1973 London Colloquy on Early South East Asia dismantled the older assumption that all Southeast Asian megaliths were prehistoric and culturally uniform, and by 1987 the term “megalith” itself had fallen into disuse among specialists [4, pp. 1–2]. Miksic argued that the batu tagak of West Sumatra and peninsular Malaysia are products of the classical era, erected in the context of the political transformations following Srivijaya’s decline and Adityawarman’s court migration into the Minang highlands [4, pp. 1–2]. Circumstantial evidence from associated inscriptions at Kuburajo and Keramat Sungai Udang points specifically to the late fourteenth to mid-fifteenth century [4, pp. 2].

Harrisson’s 1973 introductory summary explicitly rejected five assumptions that had dominated the field: that the megalithic is a cultural feature on its own; that it necessarily held great importance within group culture; that it has a single sequential origin; that it is necessarily very ancient in any one locality; and that it is directly related in origin or spread between localities [1, p. 124]. He found no clear evidence of Indian, Chinese, or other mainland features in the Bornean megalithic work, noting instead “a rather noticeable tendency to local specialisation and diversity” [1, p. 133].

Function and Ritual Significance

The function of megalithic monuments has been the subject of sustained reinterpretation. The traditional assumption that upright stones serve as grave markers was challenged on multiple fronts. The 1982 excavation of the Kampong Ipoh alignment by Adi Haji Taha and Abdul Jalil Osman yielded no skeletal remains within the megalithic area proper, directly contradicting the local batu hidup (sacred stone) tradition that these stones mark ancestral graves [7, pp. 76]. Miksic’s comparative study of 1985 proposed that the decorated monoliths at Keramat Sungai Udang and the paired alignments of Negeri Sembilan and Malacca are not grave markers but ceremonial objects associated with the reinforcement of social status [3, p. 71]. He drew parallels with the pepadon (carved wooden seat) of Lampung, where the pangkat sesaka (second grade of status) denoted the right to sit on a backrest, and with stone seats found throughout Nias, erected during historic times as part of “feasts of merit” [3, p. 74].

In Borneo, Harrisson correlated megalithic manifestation with the presence of well-settled, well-fed societies practising irrigated cultivation on stable ground: over 550 of the roughly 650 documented megaliths are directly connected to communities living in areas with irrigated rice-fields [1, p. 132]. He proposed that the advent of iron—giving quick, sure control of the rain-forest for clearing and felling—was the enabling technological precondition, and that the megalithic developed as a “natural reaction” to the total local biotope rather than as a diffusion from any mainland source [1, p. 133].

Beyond the physical monuments, Victor T. King’s 1975 study of the Maloh, an interior Dayak people of the upper Kapuas river, demonstrated that stone functions in Maloh cosmology as a dual substance: simultaneously a receptacle for active spiritual forces deployed in curing, warfare, and agriculture, and a life-negating medium through which petrifaction narratives explain landscape features and sanction moral transgression [11, pp. 104–105]. The balian (medical expert, usually female) possesses batu balian—stones that serve as temporary fixing agents for named spirits [11, pp. 105–108]. In agriculture, batu karue (“guardian stones”) placed in rice bins protect the rice-soul from straying [11, p. 109]. Harrisson’s “crypto-megalithic” concept extends this insight: highly mobile groups such as the Iban, who left no physical monuments, nonetheless carry dense megalithic references in their shamanic chant cycles and genealogies, suggesting that the stone tradition persisted in verbal form even where material expression had ceased [1, pp. 137–139].

Loofs’s 1977 study of the Mok Khalan alignment in Southern Thailand contributed a further dimension, arguing for a complex process of religious transformation from Saivite Hinduism to Buddhism. The alignment, comprising 36 visible upright stones, is associated with two decorated posts bearing a Khmer-style floral relief comparable to the door-frames of twelfth- and early thirteenth-century temples, and with linga bases indicating a nearby Saivite cult site [12, pp. 59–60]. Loofs proposed that Buddhist inhabitants dismantled or repurposed the stones of a Saivite temple, re-erecting the undecorated ones as a ritual boundary in a process of “Buddhicization” analogous to the Christianization of Breton menhirs [12, p. 60].

Research and Documentation

The study of megalithic monuments in the region has evolved through distinct phases. The earliest contributions, such as Winstedt’s 1941 synthesis and Keith’s 1947 field note, reflected the amateur-antiquarian tradition of colonial-era archaeology, relying on published museum reports and brief observations rather than systematic excavation [10, p. 93], [5, p. 153]. Keith explicitly challenged Banks’s assertion that megalithic remains are “singularly lacking” from Borneo, noting that while written references are few, the actual remains are not as rare as the silence of earlier authors might imply [5, p. 153].

The 1960s and 1970s marked a decisive shift toward systematic fieldwork and excavation. Harrisson’s two and a half decades of work across Sabah and Sarawak, conducted primarily through the Sarawak Museum, produced the bulk of the published literature on Bornean megaliths [1, p. 124]. His 1973 introductory summary directly challenged van Heekeren’s 1958 assertion that Borneo “contains very few megalithic antiquities” [1, p. 125]. On the peninsula, the 1982 excavation at Kampong Ipoh by Taha and Osman represented the first time a megalithic alignment was subjected to systematic archaeological investigation, filling a gap that Harrisson had identified as the only viable path toward clarifying the function and antiquity of these monuments [7, p. 81]. The site was made accessible only because a proposed road through a housing scheme threatened to destroy it, and the Museums Department seized the opportunity to excavate before the stones were relocated [7, pp. 75–76].

Miksic’s comparative fieldwork in the 1980s, conducted in collaboration with the Indonesian National Research Centre for Archaeology and the West Sumatra Regional Office of Education and Culture, extended the survey into West Sumatra and established the methodological framework for linking peninsular and Sumatran traditions [4, pp. 1], [5], [3, p. 71]. His 1986 preliminary account of the Mahat valley marked the transition from Schnitger’s literary-ethnographic approach to a more systematic archaeological framework [2, p. 32]. The 1985 test excavations at Bawah Parit recovered human skeletal material beneath two upright carved stones, though the bones were in a state of near-complete disintegration, making radiocarbon or comparative dating currently impossible [2, p. 32].

Several methodological cautions have shaped the field. Harrisson stressed that negative evidence—absence of stones in a given area—must be treated with extreme caution given the rapidity with which equatorial jungle obliterates such features [1, p. 132]. The 1973 London Colloquy established that the words “megalith” and “megalithic” are useful only as descriptive terms, and that no single “megalithic culture” can be posited for Southeast Asia as a whole [3, p. 71]. The visible megalithic scatter of any given period represents only a fragment of a once wider and richer activity [1, p. 132]. As of the latest documentation, the function, antiquity, and cultural attribution of many monuments remain genuinely unresolved, and the authors of the principal studies have consistently acknowledged the limits of the available evidence [10, p. 95], [7, p. 81], [2, p. 32].

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. Tom Harrisson (1973). Megalithic evidences in East Malaysia, an introductory summary JMBRAS 46(1): 123–140.
  2. J.N. Miksic (1986). A valley of megaliths in West Sumatra. Mahat (Schnitger’s Aoer Doeri) revisited JMBRAS 59(1): 27–32. Read on JSTOR
  3. J.N. Miksic (1985). Parallels between the upright stones of Western Sumatra and those in Malacca and Negri Sembilan JMBRAS 58(1): 59–90. Read on JSTOR
  4. J.N. Miksic (1987). From Seri Vijaya to Melaka: Batu Tagak in historical and cultural context JMBRAS 60(2): 1–42.
  5. H.G. Keith (1947). Megalithic remains in North Borneo JMBRAS 20(1): 153–155. Read on JSTOR
  6. Tom Harrisson (1974). The megaliths in East Malaysia II: stone urns from the Kelabit Highlands, Sarawak JMBRAS 47(1): 105–109.
  7. Abdul Jalil Osman and Adi Haji Taha (1982). The excavation of the megalithic alignment at Kampong Ipoh, Tampin, Negri Sembilan: a note. Adi Haji Taha and Abdul Jalil Osman JMBRAS 55(1): 78–81.
  8. C. (Chandran Jeshurun) Jeshurun (1973). The cultural significance of the Pengkalan Kempas megaliths JMBRAS 46(1): 93–100.
  9. Tom Harrisson (1973). Newly discovered prehistoric rock carvings in the Ulu Tomani, Sabah JMBRAS 46(1): 141–144.
  10. R.O. Winstedt (1941). Slab-graves and iron implements JMBRAS 19(1): 93–98. Read on JSTOR
  11. V.T. King (1975). Stones and the Maloh of Indonesian West Borneo JMBRAS 48(1): 104–119.
  12. H.H.E. Loofs (1977). The Mok Khalan alignment in Southern Thailand and associated archaeological remains JMBRAS 50(1): 63–67.